GSR Today - The story of copper has been intertwined with Zambia’s history since it was a British colony in the late 1800s and British mining companies set up operations. Recently, I traveled through northern Zambia with Presentation Sr. Lynette Rodrigues, a passionate environmental crusader, and learned more.

Nigeria enacted a law in 2003 prohibiting the trafficking in persons and established the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP). Yet, from its porous borders, women and children continue to be trafficked within, across and beyond the country for forced labor and sexual or physical exploitation. Even babies are sold for money. Why is human trafficking such a huge industry in Nigeria despite Nigerians’ collective value for abundant life? Why, regardless of the efforts to combat this nefarious industry, especially by the women’s religious communities in Nigeria, does this inhumanity to human persons continue unabated?

A year has passed since a global jolt awoke the world when over 200 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria on April 14, 2014. Across the world a chant resounded: “Bring Back our Girls.” It seems now the world has fallen to sleep, numb to the peril of girls; or maybe events just pass too rapidly to keep attention. If global Twitter campaigns and the voices of first ladies and prime ministers in globally dominant countries have no effect, what will wake us again?

GSR Today - In a lot of ways, Global Sisters Report, is all about confronting invisibility. The stories we write are often about people on the margins, but the stories of the sisters themselves could also be included in that categorization. Obviously, women religious aren’t looking for fame or recognition, but often, sisters don’t get credit for their ministries because no one knows about them.

Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has been very generous with his words. There have been addresses, homilies, conversations, phone calls, interviews and writings, including an apostolic exhortation on “The Joy of the Gospel” (Evangelii Gaudium). Still, the pope has been silent, or very reticent on certain questions.

Maryknoll Sr. Joseph Lourdes Nubla was born in the Philippines, where she attended Holy Ghost College and Maryknoll College, entering the Maryknoll Sisters in New York in 1960. She has served in a variety of posts in Hong Kong since 1964. She is currently a volunteer with Mission for Migrant Workers in Hong Kong, where she is an official interpreter and translator of statements, helping people from Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and elsewhere avoid exploitation by people employing them as domestic servants.

Thousands of women from throughout the world – including women religious – attended the March meetings of the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women and a parallel event known as the NGO CSW Forum, marking the two decades since the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action at the U.N.’s Beijing World Conference on Women. “It’s important for women to ‘own things’ – own the issues that are important to women,” said Dominican Sr. Bernadine Karge of Chicago.

Pope Francis has warned against allowing the lower numbers of people entering Catholic religious life to influence decisions about who is healthy and able to take lifelong vows as a priest, brother or sister. On Saturday, the pope told a meeting of an estimated 1,200 formation directors for religious orders they must be "lovingly attentive" to those they are guiding so that "the eventual crisis of quantity does not result in a much graver crisis of quality."

As our U.S. Dominican Sisters Delegation to Iraq moved from one refugee camp to another in Kurdistan-Iraq, children seemed to be everywhere! It’s not surprising, since over half of the 4 million Iraqis who have been displaced by years of war and recent attacks by ISIS/L, are children. I wondered: How can we, members of the global community, help shape the future of Iraq by advocating for the rights of the Iraqi children now?

Led by Sr. Mary Vu Thi Ngoc of the Daughters of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception volunteers take advantage of the Tet (new year) holidays, as a time when Vietnamese migrant workers return home from Laos temporarily. The sisters, doctors and others educate at-risk people about the way HIV is transmitted. For example, in Thua Thien Hue Province’s Loc Bon Commune, which recorded that 4,000 of its citizens worked in Laos in 2014, have had at least 12 migrant workers die from HIV/AIDS since 2004. This does not count those who died in Laos, where AIDS patients are shunned.